Institutions may manage multiple data stores that include specific information about, for example, functions, products, applications, facilities, customers, or processes within the entity. The institutions may desire to identify centrally the location, structure and operating characteristics of these data stores in order to facilitate effective data management, governance, and retrieval.
A data store is a container in which digital information is gathered and/or maintained. The information in the data store may be structured or unstructured. A data store is not necessarily a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), although this is one of the most common types of data store. It may take the form, for example, of a structured file system or hierarchical database. Moreover, a data store is not an application. Applications represent a use of information to fulfill a particular function. Many applications do maintain a set of data of concern only within the application's domain, but applications generally do not have a one-to-one relationship to individual data stores, especially in the case of shared information.
Large volumes of data make it practical to track descriptive information about the data and data stores, rather than collecting the data itself, and such descriptive data may be referred to as metadata. Metadata is data that provides information about other data. It is used to facilitate the understanding, use, and management of data by characterizing data resources and data sets to make them understandable, relevant, findable, and controlled. Metadata may be stored in a metadata repository data store. Current metadata management products may capture the current state of the metadata, but may not provide features to notify users of changes to the environment.